Automotive vehicles are commonly equipped with audio radios for receiving broadcast radio frequency (RF) signals, processing the RF signals, and broadcasting audio information to passengers in the vehicle. More recently, satellite digital audio radio (SDAR) services have become available. SDAR services offer digital radio service covering a large geographic area, such as North America. Satellite-based digital audio radio services are available in North America, which generally employ either geo-stationary orbit satellites or highly elliptical orbit satellites that receive up-linked programming which, in turn, is rebroadcast directly to digital radios in vehicles on the ground that subscribe to the service. These systems also use terrestrial repeater networks in urban areas to supplement the availability of service. Each vehicle subscribing to the digital service generally includes a digital radio having a receiver and one or more antennas for receiving the digital broadcast.
The radio receivers are programmed to receive and unscramble the digital data signals, which typically include many channels of digital audio. In addition to broadcasting the encoded digital quality audio signals, the satellite-based digital audio radio service may also transmit data within a data bandwidth that may be used for various applications. The broadcast signal may also include other information for reasons such as advertising, informing the driver of warranty issues, providing information about the broadcast audio information, and providing news, sports, and entertainment broadcasting. Accordingly, the digital broadcast may be employed for any of a number of satellite audio radio, satellite television, satellite Internet, and various other consumer services.
In some systems with more than one signal source (i.e. multi-stream systems) and different data sources (i.e. same data with different signal sources), there is a need to find signal(s), such as, for example, wireless satellite signals, that maximizes performance of a receiver by minimizing errors in the receiver system, which results in an improved user experience. As illustrated in FIG. 1, traditional satellite-based digital audio radio services receivers 1a typically include multiple forward error correction (FEC) circuits that receive terrestrial and satellite signals provided over a terrestrial and satellite channel, respectively, to detect which communication path does not have an error, such as a burst-type error (i.e. where the signal to noise ratio is temporarily degraded). A form of FEC, which is known in the art as ‘concatenated coding,’ combines a convolutional code and a block code, which results in a code that has an inner code and an outer code.
As illustrated in FIG. 2, other known satellite-based digital audio radio services using more than one signal (or antenna), comprises a receiver 1b including a maximum ratio combiner (MRC) that combines the satellite and terrestrial channel signals. Typically, an MRC receives and aligns two signals in time or phase, weights (magnitude adjusted) signals according to a quality criteria, which results in an improved signal magnitude upon being combined together. For example, the MRC can be thought of as adding a desired signal coherently (i.e. in phase) and adding noise non-coherently (i.e. random noise where phase is unknown) such that the signal will double in voltage (i.e. a 6 dB increase). Because noise is typically non-coherent for each source, the noise will, over some time, add at a square root of two (i.e. a 3 dB increase). Since the desired signal is increased by 6 dB and the noise is increased by 3 dB, the result is a net 3 dB increase in the signal to noise ratio. Accordingly, an MRC provides an improved system performance.
The advantage of the system seen in FIG. 1, which uses multiple FEC circuits for each frequency or antenna source, is a direct selection of the frequency or antenna source that does not have any errors. By using multiple FEC algorithms, the best signal path having the least amount of bit errors carrying the RF signal from the antenna to the FEC hardware may be chosen for the source decoder. On the other hand, as seen in FIG. 2, the use of an MRC circuit prior to an FEC circuit optimally combines phase- and time-aligned signals to improve coded signal performance in a digital communication system. Essentially, the advantage of implementing an MRC circuit prior to the FEC circuit allows the receiver to obtain better performance in low signal to thermal noise (SNR) environments, such as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) environments.
Although adequate for most situations, there are situations where the undistorted channels are combined with distorted channels, which produces a distorted input to the FEC algorithm. The combination of a distorted signal (that has a good quality measurement) and an undistorted signal may degrade the system performance. Thus, the FEC algorithm may be undesirably corrupted by the bad signal, which produces an output error, such as an audio mute in an SDAR system. In this situation, the receiver may actually use corrupted signals that appear to be in a usable condition. For example, a terrestrial signal, which may be typically corrupted more so than satellite signals, is then passed through the MRC into the FEC, which outputs an error, where, conversely, if only the satellite signal was used, no error would have occurred. Accordingly, it is therefore desirable to provide a satellite-based digital audio radio receiver that finds wireless satellite signals and minimizes errors in the receiver system to improve the overall system performance such that undesirable errors, such as audio mutes, do not occur.